Under The Volcano Part 17

"We're nearly there, I think. There's a couple of turns in the path ahead and a fallen log we have to climb over."

"Adelante, la juventud, al asalto, vamos ya, y contra los imperialismos, para un nuevo mundo hacer.

I guess you were right then," Hugh said.

There was a lull in the storm that for Yvonne, looking up at the dark treetops' long slow swaying in the wind against the tempestuous sky, was a moment like that of the tide's turning, and yet that was filled with some quality of this morning's ride with Hugh, some night essence of their shared morning thoughts, with a wild sea-yearning of youth and love and sorrow.

A sharp pistol-like report, from somewhere ahead, as of a back-firing car, broke this swaying stillness, followed by another and another. "More target practice," Hugh laughed; yet these were different mundane sounds to hold as a relief against the sickening thunder that followed, for they meant Parian was near, soon its dim lights would gleam through the trees: by a lightning flash bright as day they had seen a sad useless arrow pointing back the way they'd come, to the burned Anocht.i.tlan: and now, in the profounder gloom, Hugh's own light fell across a tree trunk on the left side where a wooden sign with a pointing hand confirmed their direction.

A PARIaN ?.

Hugh was singing behind her... It began to rain softly and a sweet cleanly smell rose from the woods. And now, here was the place where the path doubled back on itself, only to be blocked by a huge moss-covered bole that divided it from that very same path she had decided against, which the Consul must have taken beyond Tomalin. The mildewed ladder with its wide-s.p.a.ced rungs mounted against the near side of the bole was still there, and Yvonne had clambered up it almost before she realized she had lost Hugh's light. Yvonne balanced herself someway on top of this dark slippery log and saw his light again, a little to one side, moving among the trees. She said with a certain note of triumph: "Mind you don't get off the path there, Hugh, it's sort of tricky. And mind the fallen log. There's a ladder up this side, but you have to jump down on the other."

"Jump then," said Hugh. "I must have got off your path." Yvonne, hearing the plangent complaint of his guitar as Hugh banged the case, called: "Here I am, over here."

"Hijos del pueblo que oprimen cadenas esa injusticia no debe existir si tu existencia es un mundo de penas antes que esclavo, prefiere morir prefiere morir."

Hugh was singing ironically.

All at once the rain fell more heavily. A wind like an express train swept through the forest; just ahead lightning struck through the trees with a savage tearing and roar of thunder that shook the earth-- There is, sometimes in thunder, another person who thinks for you, takes in one's mental porch furniture, shuts and bolts the mind's window against what seems less appalling as a threat than as some distortion of celestial privacy, a shattering insanity in heaven, a form of disgrace forbidden mortals to observe too closely: but there is always a door left open in the mind--as men have been known in great thunderstorms to leave their real doors open for Jesus to walk in--for the entrance and the reception of the unprecedented, the fearful acceptance of the thunderbolt that never falls on oneself, for the lightning that always. .h.i.ts the next street, for the disaster that so rarely strikes at the disastrous likely hour, and it was through this mental door that Yvonne, still balancing herself on the log, now perceived that something was menacingly wrong. In the slackening thunder something was approaching with a noise that was not the rain. It was an animal of some sort, terrified by the storm, and whatever it might be--a deer, a horse, unmistakably it had hooves--it was approaching at a dead run, stampeding, plunging through the undergrowth: and now as the lightning crashed again and the thunder subsided she heard a protracted neigh becoming a scream almost human in its panic. Yvonne was aware that her knees were trembling. Calling out to Hugh she tried to turn, in order to climb back down the ladder, but felt her footing on the log give way: slipping, she tried to regain her balance, slipped again and pitched forward. One foot doubled under her with a sharp pain as she fell. The next moment attempting to rise she saw, by a brilliant flash of lightning, the riderless horse. It was plunging sideways, not at her, and she saw its every detail, the jangling saddle sliding from its back, even the number seven branded on its rump. Again trying to rise she heard herself scream as the animal turned towards her and upon her. The sky was a sheet of white flame against which the trees and the poised rearing horse were an instant pinioned.-- They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and glittering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Ura.n.u.s, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris Wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Ca.s.siopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful b.u.t.terflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful b.u.t.terflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanis.h.i.+ng astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and cras.h.i.+ng down to glide in colourless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rus.h.i.+ng through the forest and saw the tremors of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse--great G.o.d, the horse--and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and for ever?--the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in mid-air, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton, no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul, or it was a mechanical horse on the merry-go-round, the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea. But the house was on fire, she saw it now from the forest, from the steps above, she heard the crackling, it was on fire, everything was burning, the dream was burning, the house was burning, yet here they stood an instant, Geoffrey and she, inside it, inside the house, wringing their hands, and everything seemed all right, in its right place, the house was still there, everything dear and natural and familiar, save that the roof was on fire and there was this noise as of dry leaves blowing along the roof, this mechanical crackling, and now the fire was spreading even while they watched, the cupboard, the saucepans, the old kettle, the new kettle, the guardian figure on the deep cool well, the trowels, the rake, the sloping s.h.i.+ngled woodshed on whose roof the white dogwood blossoms fell but would fall no more, for the tree was burning, the fire was spreading faster and faster, the walls with their millwheel reflections of sunlight on water were burning, the flowers in the garden were blackened and burning, they writhed, they twisted, they fell, the garden was burning, the porch where they sat on spring mornings was burning, the red door, the cas.e.m.e.nt windows, the curtains she'd made were burning, Geoffrey's old chair was burning, his desk, and now his book, his book was burning, the pages were burning, burning, burning, whirling up from the fire they were scattered, burning, along the beach, and now it was growing darker and the tide coming in, the tide washed under the ruined house, the pleasure boats that had ferried song upstream sailed home silently over the dark waters of Erida.n.u.s. Their house was dying, only an agony went there now. And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades...

12.

"Mescal," said the Consul.

The main barroom of the Farolito was deserted. From a mirror behind the bar, that also reflected the door open to the square, his face silently glared at him, with stern, familiar foreboding.

Yet the place was not silent. It was filled by that ticking: the ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscience, a clock somewhere. There was a remote sound too, from far below, of rus.h.i.+ng water, of subterranean collapse; and moreover he could still hear them, the bitter wounding accusations he had flung at his own misery, the voices as in argument, his own louder than the rest, mingling now with those other voices that seemed to be wailing from a distance distressfully: "Borracho, Borrachon, Borraaaacho!"

But one of these voices was like Yvonne's, pleading. He still felt her look, their look in the Salon Ofelia, behind him. Deliberately he shut out all thought of Yvonne. He drank two swift mescals: the voices ceased.

Sucking a lemon he took stock of his surroundings. The mescal, while it a.s.suaged, slowed his mind; each object demanded some moments to impinge upon him. In one corner of the room sat a white rabbit eating an ear of Indian corn. It nibbled at the purple and black stops with an air of detachment, as though playing a musical instrument. Behind the bar hung, by a clamped swivel, a beautiful Oaxaquenan gourd of mescal de olla, from which his drink had been measured. Ranged on either side stood bottles of Tenampa, Berreteaga, Tequila Anejo, Anis doble de Mallorca, a violet decanter of Henry Mallet's "delicioso licor," a flask of peppermint cordial, a tall voluted bottle of Anis del Mono, on the label of which a devil brandished a pitchfork. On the wide counter before him were saucers of toothpicks, chillies, lemons, a tumblerful of straws, crossed long spoons in a gla.s.s tankard. At one end large bulbous jars of many-coloured aguardiente were set, raw alcohol with different flavours, in which citrus fruit rinds floated. An advertis.e.m.e.nt tacked by the mirror for last night's ball in Quauhnahuac caught his eye: Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en accion. No falte Vd. A scorpion clung to the advertis.e.m.e.nt. The Consul noted all these things carefully. Drawing long sighs of icy relief, he even counted the toothpicks. He was safe here; this was the place he loved--sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.

The "barman"--the son of the Elephant--known as A Few Fleas, a small dark sickly-looking child, was glancing nearsightedly through horn-rimmed spectacles at a cartoon serial El Hijo del Diablo in a boy's magazine. t.i.to. As he read, muttering to himself, he ate chocolates. Returning another replenished gla.s.s of mescal to the Consul he slopped some on the bar. He went on reading without wiping it up, however, muttering, cramming himself with chocolate skulls bought for the Day of the Dead, chocolate skeletons, chocolate, yes, funeral wagons. The Consul pointed out the scorpion on the wall and the boy brushed it off with a vexed gesture: it was dead. A Few Fleas turned back to his story, muttering aloud thickly, "De p.r.o.nto, Dalia vuelve en Sigrita llamando la atencion de un guardia que pasea, Suelteme! Suelteme!"

Save me, thought the Consul vaguely, as the boy suddenly went out for a change, suelteme, help: but maybe the scorpion, not wanting to be saved, had stung itself to death. He strolled across the room. After fruitlessly trying to make friends with the white rabbit, he approached the open window on his right. It was almost a sheer drop to the bottom of the ravine. What a dark, melancholy place! In Parian did Kubla Khan... And the crag was still there too--just as in Sh.e.l.ley or Calderon or both--the crag that couldn't make up its mind to crumble absolutely, it clung so, cleft, to life. The sheer height was terrifying, he thought, leaning outwards, looking sideways at the split rock and attempting to recall the pa.s.sage in The Cenci that described the huge stack clinging to the ma.s.s of earth, as if resting on life, not afraid to fall, but darkening, just the same, where it would go if it went. It was a tremendous, an awful way down to the bottom. But it struck him he was not afraid to fall either. He traced mentally the barranca's circuitous abysmal path back through the country, through shattered mines, to his own garden, then saw himself standing again this morning with Yvonne outside the printer's shop, gazing at the picture of that other rock, La Despedida, the glacial rock crumbling among the wedding invitations in the shop window, the spinning flywheel behind. How long ago, how strange, how sad, remote as the memory of first love, even of his mother's death, it seemed; like some poor sorrow, this time without effort, Yvonne left his mind again.

Popocatepetl towered through the window, its immense flanks partly hidden by rolling thunderheads; its peak blocking the sky, it appeared almost right overhead, the barranca, the Farolito, directly beneath it. Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and--relatively--fearful eyes and voices.

Turning, the Consul took his drink over to the open door. A mercurochrome agony down the west. He stared out at Parian. There, beyond a gra.s.s plot, was the inevitable square with its little public garden. To the left, at the edge of the barranca, a soldier slept under a tree. Half facing him, to the right, on an incline, stood what seemed at first sight a ruined monastery or waterworks. This was the grey turreted barracks of the Military Police he had mentioned to Hugh as the reputed Union Militar headquarters. The building, which also included the prison, glowered at him with one eye, over an archway set in the forehead of its low facade: a clock pointing to six. On either side of the archway the barred windows in the Comisario de Policia and the Policia de Seguridad looked down on a group of soldiers talking, their bugles slung over their shoulders with bright green lariats. Other soldiers, puttees flapping, stumbled at sentry duty. Under the archway, in the entrance to the courtyard, a corporal was working at a table, on which stood an unlighted oil lamp. He was inscribing something in copperplate handwriting, the Consul knew, for his rather unsteady course hither--not so unsteady however as in the square at Quauhnahuac earlier, but still disgraceful--had brought him almost on top of him. Through the archway, grouped round the courtyard beyond, the Consul could make out dungeons with wooden bars like pigpens. In one of them a man was gesticulating. Elsewhere, to the left, were scattered huts of dark thatch, merging into the jungle which on all sides surrounded the town, glowing now in the unnatural livid light of approaching storm.

A Few Fleas having returned, the Consul went to the bar for his change. The boy, not hearing apparently, slopped some mescal into his gla.s.s from the beautiful gourd. Handing it back he upset the toothpicks. The Consul said nothing further about the change for the moment. However he made a mental note to order for his next drink something costing more than the fifty centavos he had already laid down. In this way he saw himself gradually recovering his money. He argued absurdly with himself that it was necessary to remain for this alone. He knew there was another reason yet couldn't place his finger on it. Every time the thought of Yvonne recurred to him he was aware of this. It seemed indeed then as though he must stay here for her sake, not because she would follow him here--no, she had gone, he'd let her go finally now, Hugh might come, though never she, not this time, obviously she would return home and his mind could not travel beyond that point--but for something else. He saw his change lying on the counter, the price of the mescal not deducted from it. He pocketed it all and came to the door again. Now the situation was reversed; the boy would have to keep an eye on him. It lugubriously diverted him to imagine, for A Few Fleas' benefit, though half aware the preoccupied boy was not watching him at all, he had a.s.sumed the blue expression peculiar to a certain type of drunkard, tepid with two drinks grudgingly on credit, gazing out of an empty saloon, an expression that pretends he hopes help, any kind of help, may be on its way, friends, any kind of friends coming to rescue him. For him life is always just around the corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar. Yet he really wants none of these things. Abandoned by his friends, as they by him, he knows that nothing but the crus.h.i.+ng look of a creditor lives round that corner. Neither has he fortified himself sufficiently to borrow more money, nor obtain more credit; nor does he like the liquor next door anyway. Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was--The square gave him no answer. The little town, that had seemed empty, was filling up as evening wore on. Occasionally a moustachioed officer swaggered past, with a heavy gait, slapping his swagger stick on his leggings. People were returning from the cemeteries, though perhaps the procession would not pa.s.s for some time. A ragged platoon of soldiers were marching across the square. Bugles blared. The police too--those who were not on strike, or had been pretending to be on duty at the graves, or the deputies, it was not easy to get the distinction between the police and the military clear in one's mind either--had arrived in force. Con German friends, doubtless. The corporal was still writing at his table; it oddly rea.s.sured him. Two or three drinkers pushed their way past him into the Farolito, ta.s.selled sombreros on the backs of their heads, holsters slapping their thighs. Two beggars had arrived and were taking up their posts outside the bar, under the tempestuous sky. One, legless, was dragging himself through the dust like a poor seal. But the other beggar, who boasted one leg, stood up stiffly, proudly, against the cantina wall as if waiting to be shot. Then this beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man's outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar's eyes. The Consul now observed that on his extreme right some unusual animals resembling geese, but large as camels, and skinless men, without heads, upon stilts, whose animated entrails jerked along the ground, were issuing out of the forest path the way he had come. He shut his eyes from this and when he opened them someone who looked like a policeman was leading a horse up the path, that was all. He laughed, despite the policeman, then stopped. For he saw that the face of the reclining beggar was slowly changing to Senora Gregorio's, and now in turn to his mother's face, upon which appeared an expression of infinite pity and supplication.

Closing his eyes again, standing there, gla.s.s in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the s.n.a.t.c.hes of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark: spinets: he returned to the bar.

Diosdado, the Elephant, had just entered from the back. The Consul watched him discard his black coat, hang it in the closet, then feel in the breast pocket of his spotless white s.h.i.+rt for a pipe protruding from it. He took this out and began to fill it from a package of Country Club el Bueno Tono tobacco. The Consul remembered now about his pipe: here it was, no doubt about that.

"Si, si, mistair," he replied, listening with bent head to the Consul's query. "Claro. No--my ah peeper no Ingles. Monterey peeper. You were--ah--borracho one day then. No senor?

"Como no?" said the Consul.

"Twice a day."

"You was dronk three times a day," Diosdado said, and his look, the insult, the implied extent of his downfall, penetrated the Consul. "Then you'll be going back to America now," he added, rummaging behind the bar.

"I--no--por que?"

Diosdado suddenly slapped a fat package of envelopes fastened with elastic on the bar counter. "--es suyo?" he asked directly.

Where are the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters the letters she wrote till her heart broke? Here were the letters, here and nowhere else: these were the letters and this the Consul knew immediately without examining the envelopes. When he spoke he could not recognize his own voice: "Si, senor, muchas gracias," he said.

"De nada, senor." The G.o.dgiven turned away.

La rame inutile fatigua vainement une mer immobile... The Consul could not move for a full minute. He could not even make a move toward a drink. Then he began to trace sideways in spilled liquor a little map on the bar. Diosdado came back and watched with interest. "Espana," the Consul said, then his Spanish failing him, "You are Spanish, senor?"

"Si, si, senor, si," said Diosdado, watching, but in a new tone. "Espanol. Espana."

"These letters you gave me--see?--are from my wife, my esposa. Claro? This is where we met. In Spain. You recognize it, your old home, you know Andalusia? That, up there, that's the Guadalquivir. Beyond there, the Sierra Morena. Down there's Almeria. Those," he traced with his finger, "lying between, are the Sierra Nevada mountains. And there's Granada. That is the place. The very place we met." The Consul smiled.

"Granada," said Diosdado, sharply, in a different, harder p.r.o.nunciation to the Consul's. He gave him a searching, an important, suspicious look, then left him again. Now he was speaking to a group at the other end of the bar. Faces were turned in the Consul's direction.

The Consul carried another drink with Yvonne's letters into an inner room, one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle. He hadn't remembered before they were framed in dull gla.s.s, like cas.h.i.+ers' offices in a bank. In this room he was not really surprised to find the old Tarascan woman of the Bella Vista this morning. Her tequila, surrounded by dominoes, was set before her on the round table. Her chicken pecked among them. The Consul wondered if they were her own; or was it just necessary for her to have dominoes wherever she happened to be? Her stick with the claw handle hung, as though alive, on the edge of the table. The Consul moved to her, drank half his mescal, took off his gla.s.ses, then slipped the elastic from the package.

--"Do you remember tomorrow?" he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind.--It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation... He was dissociated from himself, and at the same time he saw this plainly, the shock of receiving the letters having in a sense waked him, if only, so to say, from one somnambulism into another; he was drunk, he was sober, he had a hangover; all at once; it was after six in the evening, yet whether it was being in the Farolito, or the presence of the old woman in this gla.s.s-framed room where an electric light was burning, he seemed back in the early morning again: it was almost as if he were yet another kind of drunkard, in different circ.u.mstances, in another country, to whom something quite different was happening: he was like a man who gets up half stupefied with liquor at dawn, chattering, "Jesus this is the kind of fellow I am, Ugh! Ugh!" to see his wife off by an early bus, though it is too late, and there is the note on the breakfast table. "Forgive me for being hysterical yesterday, such an outburst was certainly not excused on any grounds of your having hurt me, don't forget to bring in the milk," beneath which he finds written, almost as an afterthought: "Darling, we can't go on like this, it's too awful, I'm leaving--" and who, instead of perceiving the whole significance of this, remembers incongruously he told the barman at too great length last night how somebody's house burned down--and why has he told him where he lives, now the police will be able to find out--and why is the barman's name Sherlock? an unforgettable name!--and having a gla.s.s of port and water and three aspirin, which make him sick, reflects that he has five hours before the pubs open when he must return to that same bar and apologize... But where did I put my cigarette? and why is my gla.s.s of port under the bathtub? and was that an explosion I heard, somewhere in the house?

And encountering his accusing eyes in another mirror within the little room, the Consul had the queer pa.s.sing feeling he'd risen in bed to do this, that he had sprung up and must gibber "Coriola.n.u.s is dead!" or "muddle muddle muddle" or "I think it was, Oh! Oh!" or something really senseless like "buckets, buckets, millions of buckets in the soup!" and that he would now (though he was sitting quite calmly in the Farolito) relapse once more upon the pillows to watch, shaking in impotent terror at himself, the beards and eyes form in the curtains, or fill the s.p.a.ce between the wardrobe and the ceiling, and hear, from the street, the soft padding of the eternal ghostly policeman outside-- "Do you remember tomorrow? It is our wedding anniversary... I have not had one word from you since I left. G.o.d, it is this silence that frightens me."

The Consul drank some more mescal.

"It is this silence that frightens me--this silence--"

The Consul read this sentence over and over again, the same sentence, the same letter, all of the letters vain as those arriving on s.h.i.+pboard in port for one lost at sea, because he found some difficulty in focusing, the words kept blurring and dissembling, his own name starting out at him: but the mescal had brought him in touch with his situation again to the extent that he did not now need to comprehend any meaning in the words beyond their abject confirmation of his own lostness, his own fruitless selfish ruin, now perhaps finally self-imposed, his brain, before this cruelly disregarded evidence of what heartbreak he had caused her, at an agonized standstill.

"It is this silence that frightens me. I have pictured all sorts of tragic things befalling you, it is as though you were away at war and I were waiting, waiting for news of you, for the letter, the telegram... but no war could have this power to so chill and terrify my heart. I send you all my love and my whole heart and all my thoughts and prayers."--The Consul was aware, drinking, that the woman with the dominoes was trying to attract his attention, opening her mouth and pointing into it: now she was subtly moving round the table nearer him.--"Surely you must have thought a great deal of us, of what we built together, of how mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy the memory of that beauty. It has been this which has haunted me day and night. Turning I see us in a hundred places with a hundred smiles. I come into a street, and you are there. I creep at night to bed and you are waiting for me. What is there in life besides the person whom one adores and the life one can build with that person? For the first time I understand the meaning of suicide... G.o.d, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun s.h.i.+nes without brightness, and the moon rises without light. My heart has the taste of ashes, and my throat is tight and weary with weeping. What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways--"

The old woman was plucking at his sleeve and the Consul--had Yvonne been reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard?--reached out to press an electric bell, the urban yet violent presence of which in these odd little niches never failed to give him a shock. A moment later A Few Fleas entered with a bottle of tequila in one hand and of mescal Xicotancatl in the other but he took the bottles away after pouring their drinks. The Consul nodded to the old woman, motioned to her tequila, drank most of his mescal, and resumed reading. He could not remember whether he had paid or not.--"Oh Geoffrey, how bitterly I regret it now. Why did we postpone it? Is it too late? I want your children, soon, at once, I want them. I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand--" The Consul paused, what was she saying? He rubbed his eyes, then fumbled for his cigarettes: Alas; the tragic word droned round the room like a bullet that had pa.s.sed through him. He read on, smoking; "You are walking on the edge of an abyss where I may not follow. I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other's lips and eyes. Who is to stand between? Who can prevent?"

The Consul stood up--Yvonne had certainly been reading something--bowed to the old woman, and went out into the bar he'd imagined filling up behind him, but which was still fairly deserted. Who indeed was to stand between? He posted himself at the door again, as sometimes before in the deceptive violet dawn: who indeed could prevent? Once more he stared at the square. The same ragged platoon of soldiers still seemed to be crossing it, as in some disrupted movie repeating itself. The corporal still toiled at his copperplate handwriting under the archway, only his lamp was alight. It was getting dark. The police were nowhere to be seen. Though by the barranca the same soldier was still asleep under a tree; or wasn't it a soldier, but something else? He looked away. Black clouds were boiling up again, there was a distant breaking of thunder. He breathed the oppressive air in which there was a slight hint of coolness. Who indeed, even now, was to stand between? he thought desperately, Who indeed even now could prevent? He wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever to be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her now? A whole unlikely family of indeterminate cla.s.s were strolling past the door: the grandfather in front, correcting his watch, peering at the dim barracks clock that still said six, the mother laughing and drawing her rebozo over her head, mocking the probable storm (up in the mountains two drunken G.o.ds standing far apart were still engaged in an endlessly indecisive and wildly swinging game of b.u.mblepuppy with a Burmese gong), the father by himself smiling proudly, contemplatively, clicking his fingers, flicking a speck of dust now from his fine brown s.h.i.+ny boots. Two pretty little children with limpid black eyes were walking between them hand in hand. Suddenly the elder child freed her sister's hand, and turned a succession of cartwheels on the lush gra.s.s plot. All of them were laughing. The Consul hated to look at them... They'd gone anyway, thank G.o.d. Miserably he wanted Yvonne and did not want her. "Quiere Maria?" a voice spoke softly behind him.

At first he saw only the shapely legs of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal l.u.s.t, through the little gla.s.s-paned rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker, until by the mingitorio, the "Senores," out of whose evil-smelling gloom broke a sinister chuckle, there was merely a lightless annex no larger than a cupboard in which two men whose faces he couldn't see either were sitting, drinking or plotting.

Then it struck him that some reckless murderous power was drawing him on, forcing him, while he yet remained pa.s.sionately aware of the all too possible consequences and somehow as innocently unconscious, to do without precaution or conscience what he would never be able to undo or gainsay, leading him irresistibly out into the garden--lightning-filled at this moment, it reminded him queerly of his own house, and also of El Popo, where earlier he had thought of going, only this was grimmer, the obverse of it--leading him through the open door into the darkening room, one of many giving on the patio.

So this was it, the final stupid unprophylactic rejection. He could prevent it even now. He would not prevent it. Yet perhaps his familiars, or one of his voices, might have some good advice: he looked about him, listening; erectis whoribus. No voices came! Suddenly he laughed: it had been clever of him to trick his voices. They didn't know he was here. The room itself, in which gleamed a single blue electric bulb, was not sordid: at first sight it was a student's room. In fact it closely resembled his old room at college, only this was more s.p.a.cious. There were the same great doors and a bookcase in a familiar place, with a book open on top of the shelves. In one corner, incongruously, stood a gigantic sabre. Kashmir! He imagined he'd seen the word, then it had gone. Probably he had seen it, for the book, of all things, was a Spanish history of British India. The bed was disorderly and covered with footmarks, even what appeared bloodstains, though this bed too seemed akin to a student's cot. He noticed by it an almost empty bottle of mescal. But the floor was red flagstone and somehow its cold strong logic cancelled the horror; he finished the bottle. The girl who had been shutting the double doors while addressing him in some strange language, possibly Zapotecan, came toward him and he saw she was young and pretty. Lightning silhouetted against the window a face, for a moment curiously like Yvonne's. "Quiere Maria" she volunteered again, and flinging her arms round his neck, drew him down to the bed. Her body was Yvonne's too, her legs, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her pounding pa.s.sionate heart, electricity crackled under his fingers running over her, though the sentimental illusion was going, it was sinking into a sea, as though it had not been there, it had become the sea, a desolate horizon with one huge black sailing s.h.i.+p, hull down, sweeping into the sunset; or her body was nothing, an abstraction merely, a calamity, a fiendish apparatus for calamitous sickening sensation; it was disaster, it was the horror of waking up in the morning in Oaxaca, his body fully clothed, at half past three every morning after Yvonne had gone; Oaxaca, and the nightly escape from the sleeping Hotel Francia, where Yvonne and he had once been happy, from the cheap room giving on the balcony high up, to El Infierno, that other Farolito, of trying to find the bottle in the dark, and failing, the vulture sitting in the washbasin; his steps, noiseless, dead silence outside his hotel room, too soon for the terrible sounds of squealing and slaughter in the kitchen below--of going down the carpeted stairs to the huge dark well of the deserted dining-room once the patio, sinking into the soft disaster of the carpet, his feet sinking into heartbreak when he reached the stairs, still not sure he wasn't on the landing--and the stab of panic and self-disgust when he thought of the cold shower-bath back on the left, used only once before, but that was enough--and the silent final trembling approach, respectable, his steps sinking into calamity (and it was this calamity he now, with Maria, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ--G.o.d is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death), for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying--and his steps sinking, into his tremor, the sickening cold tremor, and into the dark well of the dining-room, with round the corner one dim light hovering above the desk, and the clock--too early--and the letters unwritten, powerless to write, and the calendar saying eternally, powerlessly, their wedding anniversary, and the manager's nephew asleep on the couch, waiting up to meet the early train from Mexico City; the darkness that murmured and was palpable, the cold aching loneliness in the high sounding dining-room, stiff with the dead white grey folded napkins, the weight of suffering and conscience greater (it seemed) than that borne by any man who had survived--the thirst that was not thirst, but itself heartbreak, and l.u.s.t, was death, death, and death again and death the waiting in the cold hotel dining-room, half whispering to himself, waiting, since El Infierno, that other Farolito, did not open till four in the morning and one could scarcely wait outside--(and this calamity he was now penetrating, it was calamity, the calamity of his own life, the very essence of it he now penetrated, was penetrating, penetrated)--waiting for the Infierno whose one lamp of hope would soon be glowing beyond the dark open sewers, and on the table, in the hotel dining-room, difficult to distinguish, a carafe of water--trembling, trembling, carrying the carafe of water to his lips, but not far enough, it was too heavy, like his burden of sorrow--"you cannot drink of it"--he could only moisten his lips, and then--it must have been Jesus who sent me this, it was only He who was following me after all--the bottle of red French wine from Salina Cruz still standing there on the table set for breakfast, marked with someone else's room number, uncorked with difficulty and (watching to see the nephew wasn't watching) holding it with both hands, and letting the blessed ichor trickle down his throat, just a little, for after all one was an Englishman, and still sporting, and then subsiding on the couch too--his heart a cold ache warm to one side--into a cold s.h.i.+vering sh.e.l.l of palpitating loneliness--yet feeling the wine slightly more, as if one's chest were being filled with boiling ice now, or there were a bar of red-hot iron across one's chest, but cold in its effect, for the conscience that rages underneath anew and is bursting one's heart burns so fiercely with the fires of h.e.l.l a bar of red-hot iron is as a mere chill to it--and the clock ticking forward, with his heart beating now like a snow-m.u.f.fled drum, ticking, shaking, time shaking and ticking toward El Infierno then--the escape!

--drawing the blanket he had secretly brought down from the hotel room over his head, creeping out past the manager's nephew--the escape!--past the hotel desk, not daring to look for mail--"it is this silence that frightens me"--(can it be there? Is this me? Alas, self-pitying miserable wretch, you old rascal) past --the escape!--the Indian night-watchman sleeping on the floor in the doorway, and like an Indian himself now, clutching the few pesos he had left, out into the cold walled cobbled city, past --the escape through the secret pa.s.sage!--the open sewers in the mean streets, the few lone dim street lamps, into the night, into the miracle that the coffins of houses, the landmarks were still there, the escape down the poor broken sidewalks, groaning, groaning--and how alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying!--and the houses so still, so cold, before dawn, till he saw, rounding the corner safe, the one lamp of El Infierno glowing, that was so like the Farolito, then, surprised once more he could ever have reached it, standing inside the place with his back to the wall, and his blanket still over his head, talking to the beggars, the early workers, the dirty prost.i.tutes, the pimps, the debris and detritus of the streets and the bottom of the earth, but who were yet so much higher than he, drinking just as he had done here in the Farolito, and telling lies, lying--the escape, still the escape!--until the lilac-shaded dawn that should have brought death, and he should have died now too; what have I done?

The Consul's eyes focused a calendar behind the bed. He had reached his crisis at last, a crisis without possession, almost without pleasure finally, and what he saw might have been, no, he was sure it was, a picture of Canada. Under a brilliant full moon a stag stood by a river down which a man and a woman were paddling a birch-bark canoe. This calendar was set to the future, for next month, December: where would he be then? In the dim blue light he even made out the names of the Saints for each December day, printed by the numerals: Santa Natalia, Santa Bibiana, S. Francisco Xavier, Santa Sabos, S. Nicolas de Bari, S. Ambrosio: thunder blew the door open, the face of M. Laruelle faded in the door.

In the mingitorio a stench like mercapatan clapped yellow hands on his face and now, from the urinal walls, uninvited, he heard his voices again, hissing and shrieking and yammering at him: "Now you've done it, now you've really done it, Geoffrey Firmin! Even we can help you no longer... Just the same you might as well make the most of it now, the night's still young..."

"You like Maria, you like?" A man's voice--that of the chuckler, he recognized--came from the gloom and the Consul, his knees trembling, gazed round him; all he saw at first were slashed advertis.e.m.e.nts on the slimy feebly lit walls: Clinica Dr. Vigil, Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos s.e.xos, Vias Urinarias, Trastornos s.e.xuales, Debilidad s.e.xual, Derrame? Nocturnos, Emisiones Prematuras, Espermatorrea Impotencia, 666. His versatile companion of this morning and last night might have been informing him ironically all was not yet lost--unfortunately by now he would be well on his way to Guanajuato. He distinguished an incredibly filthy man sitting hunched in the corner on a lavatory seat, so short his trousered feet didn't reach the littered, befouled floor. "You like Maria?" this man croaked again. "I send. Me amigo." He farted. "Me fliend Englisman all tine, all tine." "Que hora?" asked the Consul, s.h.i.+vering, noticing, in the runnel, a dead scorpion; a sparkle of phosph.o.r.escence and it had gone, or had never been there. "What's the time?" "Sick," answered the man. "No, it er ah half past sick by the c.o.c.k." "You mean half past six by the clock." "Si senor. Half past sick by the c.o.c.k."

666.--The p.r.i.c.ked peetroot, pickled betroot; the Consul, arranging his dress, laughed grimly at the pimp's reply--or was he some sort of stool pigeon, in the strictest sense of that term? And who was it had said earlier, half past tree by the c.o.c.k? How had the man known he was English, he wondered, taking his laughter back through the gla.s.s-paned rooms, out through the filling bar to the door again--perhaps he worked for the Union Militar, squatting at stool all day in the Seguridad jakes eavesdropping on the prisoners" conversation, while pimping was just a sideline. He might have found out from him about Maria, whether she was--but he didn't want to know. He'd been right about the time though. The clock on the Comisaria de Policia, annular, imperfectly luminous, said, as if it had just moved forward with a jerk, a little after six-thirty, and the Consul corrected his watch, which was slow. It was now quite dark. Yet the same ragged platoon still seemed to be marching across the square. The corporal was no longer writing, however. Outside the prison stood a single motionless sentinel. The archway behind him was suddenly swept by wild light. Beyond, by the cells, the shadow of a policeman's lantern was swinging against the wall. The evening was filled by odd noises, like those of sleep. The roll of a drum somewhere was a revolution, a cry down the street someone being murdered, brakes grinding far away a soul in pain. The plucked chords of a guitar hung over his head. A bell clanged frantically in the distance. Lightning twitched. Half past sick by the c.o.c.k... In British Columbia, in Canada, on cold Pineaus Lake, where his island had long since become a wilderness of laurel and Indian Pipe, of wild strawberry and Oregon holly, he remembered the strange Indian belief prevailing that a c.o.c.k would crow over a drowned body. How dread the validation that silver February evening long ago when, as acting Lithuanian Consul to Vernon, he had accompanied the search party in the boat, and the bored rooster had roused himself to crow shrilly seven times! The dynamite charges had apparently disturbed nothing, they were sombrely rowing for sh.o.r.e through the cloudy twilight, when suddenly, protruding from the water, they had seen what looked at first like a glove--the hand of the drowned Lithuanian. British Columbia, the genteel Siberia, that was neither genteel nor a Siberia, but an undiscovered, perhaps an undiscoverable paradise, that might have been a solution, to return there, to build, if not on his island, somewhere there, a new life with Yvonne. Why hadn't he thought of it before? Or why hadn't she? Or had that been what she was getting at this afternoon, and which had half communicated itself to his mind? My little grey home in the west. Now it seemed to him he had often thought of it before, in this precise spot where he was standing. But now too at least this much was clear. He couldn't go back to Yvonne if he wanted to. The hope of any new life together, even were it miraculously offered again, could scarcely survive in the arid air of an estranged postponement to which it must now, on top of everything else, be submitted for brutal hygienic reasons alone. True, those reasons were without quite secure basis as yet, but for another purpose that eluded him they had to remain una.s.sailable. All solutions now came up against their great Chinese wall, forgiveness among them. He laughed once more, feeling a strange release, almost a sense of attainment. His mind was clear. Physically he seemed better too. It was as if, out of an ultimate contamination, he had derived strength. He felt free to devour what remained of his life in peace. At the same time a certain gruesome gaiety was creeping into this mood, and, in an extraordinary way, a certain lightheaded mischievousness. He was aware of a desire at once for complete glutted oblivion and for an innocent youthful fling. "Alas," a voice seemed to be saying also in his ear, "my poor little child, you do not feel any of these things really, only lost, only homeless."

He started. In front of him tied to a small tree he hadn't noticed, though it was right opposite the cantina on the other side of the path, stood a horse cropping the lush gra.s.s. Something familiar about the beast made him walk over. Yes--exactly as he thought. He could mistake by now neither the number seven branded on the rump nor the leather saddle charactered in that fas.h.i.+on. It was the Indian's horse, the horse of the man he'd first seen today riding it singing into the sunlit world, then abandoned, left dying by the roadside. He patted the animal which twitched its ears and went on cropping imperturbably--perhaps not so imperturbably; at a rumble of thunder the horse, whose saddlebags he noticed had been mysteriously restored, whinnied uneasily, shaking all over. When just as mysteriously those saddlebags no longer c.h.i.n.ked. Unbidden, an explanation of this afternoon's events came to the Consul. Hadn't it turned out to be a policeman into which all those abominations he'd observed a little while since had melted, a policeman leading a horse in this direction? Why should not that horse be this horse? It had been those vigilante hombres who'd turned up on the road this afternoon, and here in Parian, as he'd told Hugh, was their headquarters. How Hugh would relish this, could he be here! The police--ah, the fearful police--or rather not the real police, he corrected himself, but those Union Militar fellows were at the bottom, in an insanely complicated manner but still at the bottom, of the whole business. He felt suddenly sure of this. As if out of some correspondence between the subnormal world itself and the abnormally suspicious delirious one within him the truth had sprung--sprung like a shadow however, which-- "Que haceis aqui?"

"Nada," he said, and smiled at the man resembling a Mexican sergeant of police who had s.n.a.t.c.hed the bridle from his hands. "Nothing. Veo que la tierra anda; estoy esperando que pase mi casa por aqui para meterme en ella," he brilliantly managed. The bra.s.swork on the amazed policeman's uniform buckles caught the light from the doorway of the Farolito, then, as he turned, the leather on his sam-browne caught it, so that it was glossy as a plantain leaf, and lastly his boots, which shone like dull silver. The Consul laughed: just to glance at him was to feel that mankind was on the point of being saved immediately. He repeated the good Mexican joke, not quite right, in English, patting the policeman, whose jaw had dropped in bewilderment and who was eyeing him blankly, on the arm. "I learn that the world goes round so I am waiting here for my house to pa.s.s by." He held out his hand."Amigo," he said.

The policeman grunted, brus.h.i.+ng the Consul's hand off. Then, giving him quick suspicious glances over his shoulder, he fastened the horse more securely to the tree. In those swift glances there was something serious indeed, the Consul was aware, something that bade him escape at his peril. Slightly hurt, he now remembered too, the look Diosdado had given him. But the Consul felt neither serious nor like escaping. Nor did his feelings change as he found himself impelled by the policeman from behind towards the cantina, beyond which, by lightning, the east briefly appeared, in onrush, a towering thunderhead. Preceding him through the door, it actually struck the Consul that the sergeant was trying to be polite. He stood aside quite nimbly, bidding, with a gesture, the other go first. "Mi amigo," he repeated. The policeman shoved him in and they made for one end of the bar which was empty.

"Americano, eh?" this policeman said now firmly. "Wait, aqui. Comprende, senor?" He went behind the bar to speak with Diosdado.

The Consul unsuccessfully tried to intrude, on his conduct's behalf, a cordial note of explanation for the Elephant, who appeared grim as if he'd just murdered another of his wives to cure her neurasthenia. Meantime, A Few Fleas, temporarily otiose, and with surprising charity, slid him a mescal along the counter. People were looking at him again. Then the policeman confronted him from the other side of the bar. "They say there ees trouble about you no pay," he said, "you no pay for--ah--Mehican whisky. You no pay for Mehican girl. You no have money, hey?"

"Zicker," said the Consul, whose Spanish, in spite of a temporary insurgence, he knew virtually gone. "Si. Yes. Mucho dinero," he added, placing a peso on the counter for A Few Fleas. He saw that the policeman was a heavy-necked handsome man with a black gritty moustache, flas.h.i.+ng teeth, and a rather consciously swashbuckling manner. He was joined at this moment by a tall slim man in well-cut American tweeds with a hard sombre face and long beautiful hands. Glancing periodically at the Consul he spoke in undertones with Diosdado and the policeman. This man, who looked pure-bred Castilian, seemed familiar and the Consul wondered where he had seen him before. The policeman, disengaging himself from him, leaned over with his elbows on the bar, talking to the Consul. "You no have money, hey, and now you steal my horse." He winked at the G.o.dgiven. "What for you ah run away with Mehican caballo? for to no pay Mehican money--hey?"

The Consul stared at him. "No. Decidedly not. Of course I wasn't going to steal your horse. I was merely looking at it, admiring it."

"What for you want to look at Mehican caballo? For why?" The policeman laughed suddenly, with real merriment, slapping his thighs--obviously he was a good fellow and the Consul, feeling the ice was broken, laughed too. But the policeman obviously enough was also quite drunk, so it was difficult to gauge the quality of this laughter. While the faces of both Diosdado and the man in tweeds remained black and stern. "You make a the map of the Spain," the policeman persisted, controlling his laughter finally." You know ah Spain?"

"Comment non," the Consul said. So Diosdado had told him about the map, yet surely that was an innocently sad enough thing to have done. "Oui. Es muy asombrosa," No, this wasn't Pernambuco: definitely he ought not to speak Portuguese. "Jawohl. Correcto, senor," he finished. "Yes, I know Spain."

"You make a the map of the Spain? You Bolsheviki p.r.i.c.k? You member of the Brigade Internationale and stir up trouble?"

"No," answered the Consul firmly, decently, but now somewhat agitated. "Absolutamente no."

"Ab-so-lut-a-mente hey?" The policeman, with another wink at Diosdado, imitated the Consul's manner. He came round to the correct side of the bar again, bringing the sombre man with him who didn't say a word or drink but merely stood there, looking stern, as did the Elephant, opposite them now, angrily drying gla.s.ses. "All," he drawled, and "right!" the policeman added with tremendous emphasis, slapping the Consul on the back. "All right. Come on my friend--" he invited him. "Drink. Drink a all you ah want to have. We have been looking for you," he went on in a loud, half bantering, drunken tone. "You have murdered a man and escaped through seven states. We want to found out about you. We have founded out--it is right?--you desert your s.h.i.+p at Vera Cruz? You say you have money. How much money a you have got?"

The Consul took out a crumpled note and replaced it in his pocket. "Fifty pesos, hey. Perhaps that not enough money. What are you for? Ingles? Espanol? Americano? Aleman? Russish? You come a from the you-are-essy-essy? What for are you do?"

"I no spikker the English--hey, what's your names?" someone else asked him loudly at his elbow, and the Consul turned to see another policeman dressed much like the first, only shorter, heavy-jowled, with little cruel eyes in an ashen pulpy clean-shaven face. Though he carried sidearms both his trigger finger and his right thumb were missing. As he spoke he made an obscene rolling movement of his hips and winked at the first policeman and at Diosdado though avoiding the eyes of the man in tweeds. "Progresion al culo," he added, for no reason the Consul knew of, still rolling his hips.

"He is the Chief of Munic.i.p.ality," the first policeman explained heartily to the Consul. "This man want to know ah your name. Como se llama?"

"Yes, what's your names?" shouted the second policeman, who had taken a drink from the bar, but not looking at the Consul and still rolling his hips.

"Trotsky," gibed someone from the far end of the counter, and the Consul, beard-conscious, flushed.

"Blackstone," he answered gravely, and indeed, he asked himself, accepting another mescal, had he not and with a vengeance come to live among the Indians? The only trouble was one was very much afraid these particular Indians might turn out to be people with ideas too. "William Blackstone."

"Why ah are you," shouted the fat policeman, whose own name was something like Zuzugoitea, "What ah are you for?" And he repeated the catechism of the first policeman, whom he seemed to imitate in everything." "Ingles? Aleman?"

The Consul shook his head. "No. Just William Blackstone."

"You are Juden?" the first policeman demanded.

"No. Just Blackstone," the Consul repeated, shaking his head, "William Blackstone. Jews are seldom very borracho'

"You are--ah--a borracho, hey," the first policeman said, and everyone laughed--several others, his henchmen evidently, had joined them though the Consul couldn't distinguish them clearly--save the inflexible indifferent man in tweeds. "He is the Chief of Gardens," the first policeman explained, continuing; "That man is Jefe de Jardineros." And there was a certain awe in his tone." I am chief too, I am Chief of Rostrums," he added, but almost reflectively, as if he meant "I am only Chief of Rostrums."

"And I--" began the Consul.

"Am perfectamente borracho," finished the first policeman, and everyone roared again save the Jefe de Jardineros.

"Y yo--" repeated the Consul, but what was he saying? And who were these people, really? Chief of what Rostrums, Chief of what Munic.i.p.ality, above all, Chief of what Gardens? Surely this silent man in tweeds, sinister too, though apparently the only one unarmed in the group, wasn't the one responsible for all those little public gardens. Albeit the Consul was prompted by a shadowy prescience he already had concerning the claimants to these t.i.tular pretensions. They were a.s.sociated in his mind with the Inspector General of the State and also as he had told Hugh with the Union Militar. Doubtless he'd seen them here before in one of the rooms or at the bar, but certainly never at such close quarters as this. However so many questions he was unable to answer were being showered upon him by so many different people this significance was almost forgotten. He gathered, though, that the respected Chief of Gardens, to whom at this moment he sent a mute appeal for help, might be even "higher" than the Inspector-General himself. The appeal was answered by a blacker look than ever: at the same time the Consul knew where he'd seen him before; the Chief of Gardens might have been the image of himself when, lean, bronzed, serious, beardless, and at the crossroads of his career, he had a.s.sumed the Vice-Consuls.h.i.+p in Granada. Innumerable tequilas and mescals were being brought and the Consul drank everything in sight without regard for owners.h.i.+p, "It's not enough to say they were at the El Amor de los Amores together," he heard himself repeating--it must have been in answer to some insistent demand for the story of this afternoon, though why it should be made at all he didn't know--"What matters is how the thing happened. Was the peon--perhaps he wasn't quite a peon--drunk? Or did he fail from his horse? Perhaps the thief just recognized a boon companion who owed him a drink or two--"

Thunder growled outside the Farolito. He sat down. It was an order. Everything was growing very chaotic. The bar was now nearly full. Some of the drinkers had come from the graveyards, Indians in loose-fitting clothes. There were dilapidated soldiers with among them here and there a more smartly dressed officer. He distinguished in the gla.s.s rooms bugles and green lariats moving. Several dancers had entered dressed in long black cloaks streaked with luminous paint to represent skeletons. The Chief of Munic.i.p.ality was standing behind him now. The Chief of Rostrums was standing too, talking on his right with the Jefe de Jardineros, whose name, the Consul had discovered, was Fructuoso Sanabria. "Hullo, que tal?" asked the Consul. Someone was sitting next him with his back half turned who also seemed familiar. He looked like a poet, some friend of his college days. Fair hair fell over his fine forehead. The Consul offered him a drink which this young man not only refused, in Spanish, but rose to refuse, making a gesture with his hand of pus.h.i.+ng the Consul away, then moving, with angry half-averted face, to the far end of the bar. The Consul was hurt. Again he sent a mute appeal for help to the Chief of Gardens: he was answered by an implacable, an almost final look. For the first time the Consul scented the tangibility of his danger. He knew Sanabria and the first policemen were discussing him with the utmost hostility, deciding what to do with him. Then he saw they were trying to catch the Chief of Munic.i.p.ality's attention. They were breasting their way, just the two of them, behind the bar again to a telephone he hadn't noticed, and the curious thing about this telephone was that it seemed to be working properly. The Chief of Rostrums did the talking: Sanabria stood by grimly, apparently giving instructions. They were taking their time, and realizing the call would be about him, whatever its nature, the Consul, with a slow burning pain of apprehension, felt again how lonely he was, that all around him in spite of the crowd, the uproar, slightly muted at a gesture from Sanabria, stretched a solitude like the wilderness of grey heaving Atlantic conjured to his eyes a little while since with Maria, only this time no sail was in sight. The mood of mischievousness and release had vanished completely. He knew he'd half hoped all along Yvonne would come to rescue him, knew, now, it was too late, she would not come. Ah, if Yvonne, if only as a daughter, who would understand and comfort him, could only be at his side now! Even if but to lead him by the hand, drunkenly homeward through the stone fields, the forests--not interfering of course with his occasional pulls at the bottle, and ah, those burning draughts in loneliness, he would miss them, wherever he was going, they were perhaps the happiest things his life had known!--as he had seen the Indian children lead their fathers home on Sundays. Instantly, consciously, he forgot Yvonne again. It ran in his head he could perhaps leave the Farolito at this moment by himself, unnoticed and without difficulty, for the Chief of Munic.i.p.ality was still deep in conversation, while the backs of the two other policemen at the telephone were turned, yet he made no move. Instead, leaning his elbows on the bar, he buried his face in his hands.

He saw again in his mind's eye that extraordinary picture on Laruelle's wall, Los Borrachones, only now it took on a somewhat different aspect. Might it have another meaning, that picture, unintentional as its humour, beyond the symbolically obvious? He saw those people like spirits appearing to grow more free, more separate, their distinctive n.o.ble faces more distinctive, more n.o.ble, the higher they ascended into the light; those florid people resembling huddled fiends, becoming more like each other, more joined together, more as one fiend, the farther down they hurled into the darkness. Perhaps all this wasn't so ludicrous. When he had striven upwards, as at the beginning with Yvonne, had not the "features" of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out that the farther down he sank, the more those features had tended to dissemble, to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there were still? Yes, but had he desired it, willed it, the very material world, illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way. Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of dissolution that became more and more like one Voice to a death more dead than death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of boundaries, in which the spirit was an ent.i.ty, perfect and whole: ah, who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love? Yet it had to be faced, down, down he had gone, down till--it was not the bottom even now, he realized. It was not the end quite yet. It was as if his fall had been broken by a narrow ledge, a ledge from which he could neither climb up nor down, on which he lay b.l.o.o.d.y and half stunned, while far below him the abyss yawned, waiting. And on it as he lay he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself, the policemen, Fructuoso Sanabria, that other man who looked like a poet, the luminous skeletons, even the rabbit in the corner and the ash and sputum on the filthy floor--did not each correspond, in a way he couldn't understand yet obscurely recognized, to some fraction of his being? And he saw dimly too how Yvonne's arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Senora Gregorio, the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day indeed had been as indifferent tufts of gra.s.s he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on hi